Parliamentary Voting System and Constituencies Bill

My Lords, like my noble friend Lord Grocott, I am quite depressed about the Bill but I am also now very confused, as I find for the first time, sitting opposite the noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, that I completely agree with him. That certainly did not happen often in the other place. On the other hand, there were elements of my noble friend Lord Knight’s speech that I completely disagreed with. I do not support AV—I support first past the post—and I certainly do not support elections to this House. It would be ludicrous if, while we are reducing elected representation to the other place, we start to increase it in this House. However, I agree with my noble friend Lord Knight that the Bill should be two Bills, not one. It seems that it has simply been cobbled together for convenience. The two parts of the Bill bear no relation to each other and were made not in a coalition but an unholy alliance. The noble Lord the Leader of the House told us that this coalition was what the country wanted. How do we know this? We know that the country did not want the Government that were in place. It did not want the Conservative Party; it certainly did not want the Liberal party. What did we get? Everybody got what nobody wanted—not a consensus but a coalition. The electorate might have been telling us that they wanted some consensus but what they got was a cobbled- together coalition, rather like this cobbled-together Bill. The noble Lord, Lord Baker, told us that he did not support AV but it was a price worth paying. I am sorry he is not in his place now because I would tell him about a price that the Labour Party thought was worth paying in relation to the Scottish Parliament. Before the legislation for the Scottish Parliament there was something called the Scottish Constitutional Convention, in which the Labour Party, the Liberal party, several other parties and parts of civic Scotland—such as churches and trade unions—took part. We came to an agreement before the legislation that we, the Labour Party, would support a system of PR for the Scottish Parliament if the Liberal party supported a gender balance for the Scottish Parliament. Subsequent to the legislation, the Labour Party tried to deliver a gender balance within its own rules. I am sorry to say that the Liberal party at no time tried to deliver that gender balance. So I say to the noble Lord, Lord Baker, be careful what you wish for here as you might get something completely different from what you set out to achieve. The noble Lord, Lord Forsyth, was right again; the Labour Party did go forward with AV in our manifesto, but we lost the election with that in our manifesto. I am astounded that the coalition is taking up what we lost. If there is genuinely to be a referendum on PR systems—